June 4, 2012

Jubilation :-)

Another long day has passed by and despite being sat on my backside for most of it I’m well and truly whacked once more 😦 This time through driving though and not any hard physical or mental labours, much as I love my Land Rover it is a bit of a ‘tank’ and not great for commuting long distances. People will go on about how great they are for towing, which is true to a point, ie boggy fields or heavy loads for short distances. For a two hundred mile dash to the ‘local’ abattoir and back with one pig in a light trailer a standard ‘eurobox’ would have done the job quicker, cheaper and easier 🙂 Mind you it wouldn’t have pulled the trailer out of the field this morning complete with Toots!!

Trying to recall

Anyway I’m getting a little ahead of myself so I’ll try and bring you ‘up to speed’ on the ‘daily doings’ of the accidental crofter at the end of the road 🙂 A lightning quick effort with a picture of Annie Maclean was all I could manage prior to attacking Sunday. Saturday had been ‘written off’ but I awoke on the Sabbath ready for action and after a little ‘light blogging’ and breakfast blazed over to Torran with a brush cutter and a ‘wee helper’.

The luxurious yet remote schoolhouse at Raasay’s north end http://www.uniquescotland.com/raasayschool/index.html had been empty for a couple of weeks and I was wanting to give it the ‘once over’ prior to a let later on in the day. The lawn I’d delegated to my boy but his late night out with friends at Torran and the fact that it was a bit of a jungle decided me to do it myself.

That done, albeit a little roughly 🙂 we checked the batteries

turned on the ‘Harris turbine’

and had a look at the domestic water inlet

all of which were functioning well.

This track that leads off from the main path towards Fladda was until the 1950’s the original route there

with some fine steps and drains along its route

and of course some fine views over Loch Arnish.

Leaving the schoolhouse behind we returned to Arnish and the shed on a shed 🙂

And I have to say I’m ‘pretty chuffed’ with the results so far 🙂

Unlike most manufacturers of anything in kit form, Robinsons http://www.rbscotland.co.uk/ give you more than enough of everything. I’ll have plenty of roofing screws, coach bolts to build my ‘lean too’ and I even had enough sheets left over to do the roof. So far the only item I’ve bought is that clear roof sheet, and that was only because my mate Ron had it. The two large double glazed windows that came from ‘Oyster George’s’ house should let more than enough light in.

I had planned to sheet it on the sides with corrugated iron removed from my parents house twenty years ago, which would have been perfectly adequate. However as I’ve only spent £50 on this magnificent structure I’m going to ‘push the boat out’ and clad it in the same box profile as the shed 🙂

After lunch I set up the trailer in a field for Toots to sleep in prior to her trip to the abattoir today and spent the rest of the day making wood shavings for wifey 🙂

Cutting firewood is something I avoid at this time of year but the ‘hen lady’ was needing saw dust for the nest boxes so I just got on with it. Simon’s ‘Loggit’ http://www.raasayengineering.co.uk/loggit.html turning a chore into almost a pleasure 🙂

Thick heavy conifer

or gnarled and twisted birch, the Loggit grips them all at a comfortable height for the back.

The couple of hours work that saw me cut up the last of my ten year old stockpiled wood from the ‘clearfell’ at Screapadale 😦 The four good bags of wood shavings should hopefully keep the chooks happy for a good while to come, not to mention the wife 🙂

The Jubilee

Being off work has meant that I’ve missed all the Jubilee hype, me being a bit of an ostrich an all that. Not watching TV and only listening to the radio driving to work really does work miracles for the blood pressure 🙂 Call me miserable but I’m just not into this kind of stuff, I don’t mind others doing it and having a whale of a time, and probably if I lived near the Thames I’d have my Pioner in the water along with the rest of them 🙂 However, thankfully I don’t live anywhere London and I’m not going to buy some carp union jack underwear, flags, or mugs to fuel the Chinese economy and end up in the landfill next week 🙂

Well done queenie for sixty years on the throne but Raasay had a much more important dual ‘golden anniversary’ to celebrate.

For two boys from Ballachuirn hit 50 on Saturday

and they’re both still smiling 🙂

Me I spent the day taking Toots to Dingwall and being pleasantly surprised by the total lack of traffic on the roads. I can only assume from this that I’m in the minority and everyone else is having a street party or watching it on the telly 🙂

Ten minutes in Tesco’s for a little fruit, water and bread and we were on our way home

stopping at Loch Sgabhain to amuse the boys with some stone throwing on the way home.

All that’s left of the old freshwater HFF site now is the wooden shed and concrete jetty but at one time there was half a dozen fish cages in here for rearing smolts. A wilder and colder place you could not find in the winter and that’s usually when we ended up working there 😦 It was one of ten or eleven sites we used to service as divers for Highland Fish Farmers and probably the most remote.

A little further on we were greeted by an unusual amount of traffic and a yellow helicopter 😦 which could only mean one thing.

Sure enough it was the ‘air ambulance’ and a damaged car and motorcycle at the nasty bridge between Craig and Coulags on the A890

Despite the hold up we comfortably made the 15:00 ferry, though I was too tired to get out of the Landy and dozed on the way to Raasay leaving wifey to amuse the two boys en route 🙂

That was about it really I cut the lawn and called it a day, venturing out of the house only when wifey spotted Bracken with her snout in the lawn clippings, she had obviously figured out how to open the gate as they were all firmly shut. Something I confirmed by leading her out with a couple of pears and then watching her head back to the one gate that she’d ‘sussed’ and try to open it with her snout, a stronger catch is no on the ‘to do’ list 🙂

Thanks Rob,
dunno what it was but wifey had it too, only lasted a day but really floored the pair of us, fortunately we had it on different days or I just don’t know how we’d have coped with the boys 🙂